


Toss Me A Rope

by Firelight_and_Rain



Series: Happily Ever After Or Something Like It [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Major Spoilers, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:19:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firelight_and_Rain/pseuds/Firelight_and_Rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A persistent little thought had planted itself in Carolina's mind, fed by the stories she'd heard of events a year before she went and got herself involved.</p><p>That because Church believed something, maybe didn't mean that everyone else just should.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toss Me A Rope

**Author's Note:**

> I thought this fic was going to be vastly different before I started writing it, and then it sort of ended up spawning its own continuity I'm still happily writing.
> 
> Hope everyone enjoys the return of our favorite half-shark homicidal revenant.
> 
> Warnings: major fucking spoilers, some angst predicated on the interpretation that Epsilon didn't survive the S 13 finale.

Just because Epsilon forgot someone, just because he deleted a stack of files somewhere near his emotional core in a touching scene that no human could ever hope to pull off so neatly, didn’t mean that that person was gone.  


And no amount of desperation, technology, or the next worst thing to blood sacrifice could resurrect the dead. That was the point.  


(Which made Epsilon’s decision on the Charon all the more infuriating. They’d paid enough into his account, and now he was only an intelligence in the most tenuous sense, no more Church, no more Alpha, and of course no more Director).  


(Why hadn’t she ended up with the armor? With Epsilon?)  


But this wasn’t going to be about Epsilon.  


Technically speaking Carolina wasn’t supposed to be here - there. But somehow the U.N.S.C., who transparently hoped to use both her and the badly broken memory capture unit as evidence in Hargrove’s posthumous trial, had forgotten who it was who’d stolen the unit last time.  


She appreciated it. She wasn’t so tempted to see if she could pull off cracking skulls, or, hey, pulling Bond moves and then melting into the background this close to Earth. (Maybe a little tempted. But not half so tempted as she was determined to get all this over and passed as cleanly as possible).  


The room was long and low, buzzing fitfully with the breath of its electronics. Carolina knew that the memory capture unit - which Tucker had carelessly referred to as Epsilon; but then, no need to be pedantic, he wouldn’t listen to her even if she was - wouldn’t be among the various unquiet and glowing items in the room. It had looked just like a heap of plastic junk when Carolina had finished extracting Epsilon from it, years ago. And she would have continued to think of it as just an irrelevant lump of junk if she hadn’t heard from one of the legions of law-type persons employed by the U.N.S.C. for these proceedings that the U.N.S.C. was planning on using it, using its innards, for evidence.  


And a nagging, persistent little thought had planted itself in the soil of the stories she’d heard describing Wash’s throwdown, alongside the Meta, against Tex.  


Carolina prowled through the room, careful as she could, for once in her life keeping a tight leash on her cockiness (no one, constructed or otherwise, to catch her if she fell now, even if the metaphorical rope was far below being a high wire). No doubt, for all their carelessness, the U.N.S.C. had put it in a moderately “safe” place. Carolina was hoping for it. It’d make it much easier for her to find.  


She wasn’t fighting anything but the clock.  


The memory unit was indeed set on an ostentatiously neat shelf of evidence, but to Carolina’s surprise, the box it was nesting in was unlocked. She lifted it out and carried it to a spot on the floor with a decent line of sight to the door. No windows here to show her the progression of the night, she only had her watch for that, and no windows to the outside world to ground her.  


Since a good part of her research on how to open the memory capture unit had been gathered from Caboose, Carolina felt that was probably largely working via superstition.  


But it worked. Maybe there was something to those sim troopers’ approach after all. Wash certainly thought so.  


The memory capture unit chirped at her and opened on the floor in front of her knees, reminiscent of a flower blooming. There was a scratched sound, like a nail over a vinyl disc if that hadn’t been before Carol’s time, and a holographic figure glitched into sight above the unit. Carol hunched down to see it in more detail. There wasn’t much, but the black as coal armor was instantly recognizable.  


Holograph!Texas tilted her head up towards Carol. “Hello. I thought I heard you up there when Caboose busted Epsilon out.”  


Carol took a moment, breathed. To handle more than anything else the lack of emotion she felt in that moment, compared to what she’d built up feeling in her mind at the prospect of seeing Agent Texas again.  


“Yes, that was me. I didn’t think you’d have survived the memory capture intact.” An excuse, a challenge. Carolina wasn’t even sure why she was there, beyond that her own rebellion against the Director had been the inheritor of Texas’ - Allison’s - own anger.  


Holograph!Texas crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, surprise! Happy to see me?” Though her voice was tinny through the technology that constituted her, Carolina didn’t think that it was as baiting as she would have expected.  


“Strangely enough? Yes.”  


Holograph!Texas stilled. “Last I heard, you still wanted to kick my ass for rejecting the Director.”  


Carolina felt herself holding her shoulders stiffly, but did her best to train her gaze on Holograph!Tex’s tiny helmet. “If someone tries to protect you from a teammate while the man who put you in that situation looks on and places bets, you might take advantage of everyone thinking that you’ve died to do some hard thinking. So - thank you, Texas.”  


“I’m glad to hear it,” Holograph!Texas said after a moment of thought. After another moment, “So, what are you doing here, anyway?”  


Carolina would have expected her to ask after the Director. Alpha - or, maybe, no, not that. That she didn’t let Carolina think no better of Epsilon, which she found she wanted to. Had found that she wanted to awhile ago. Her quest. Not that.  


“Epsilon said he’d followed you in here, and I wanted to see what was left of you.”  


“Hoping to show me up one more time?” Carolina could hear something like amusement in Tex’s voice. Hadn’t been long, and already they were communicating better than they ever had during Freelancer’s days.  


“No. It didn’t seem right to leave you behind for the U.N.S.C. and whoever the next Hargrove is, after everything you’ve done.”  


Tex scoffed. “This is just a shell. Being left behind is hardly to worst thing to happen to me.”  


And there was that defensiveness again, rearing its head. “Look, I went through a lot to figure out that presumptiveness isn’t something I should pick up from Freelancer.”  


“This - this is really fucking weird,” Tex said portentously.  


Carolina softly laughed off some of the tension of the conversation. “Believe me. I know. But considering Epsilon’s friends, I probably shouldn’t be surprised at anything anymore.”  


“The sim soldiers? Are they still alive?”  


“Yep.”  


“Huh,” Tex said blandly. “Even Caboose? Sheila?”  


“Surprisingly, yes. Private Caboose is still alive and well. I don’t know about Sheila. I’d have to ask Wash about that.”  


“Washington?” Holograph!Tex said, sounding alarmed (which, on her, still sounded more angry than scared).  


“Oh, right. We have a lot of catching up to do.” Though it seemed to her to be spur of the moment, the decision she would in a moment make had been made for her the moment that she had reached out to Wash, when she had joined the legions of those returned from the dead to take down the Director, to tear up the tracks. “We should do that somewhere more comfortable.”  


Holograph!Tex shifted again. “Planning on stealing U.N.S.C. property?”  


“Yes.” As she spoke, she held out a memory storage unit in her open palm. “Granted, I don’t really know how this works. Maybe it doesn’t help us any. But I’ve known some A.I. fragments who could pull off some really - unexpected - shit.” Maybe she was offering an open door to the ghost of a ghost. The best scientists the Director could buy didn’t know exactly what Beta was, and maybe this wasn’t even Beta, for all that she talked to Carolina just the same. But if there was anything of Tex left, Carolina knew that the best way to get what she thought she maybe wanted (in the wake of Epsilon’s passing, or not) was to offer a challenge.  


“Well, we are war criminals.” There was the shadow of a feline grin in Tex’s thin voice.


End file.
